The lawsuit was brought against the tech giants in question by current and former employees who believed (correctly) that their employers had created agreements to avoid attempting to hire engineers from one another. The idea was that if no competitors were making offers, each company was free to pay its employees whatever it wanted without having to worry about them jumping ship for a better offer.

Emails between executives at these companies revealed that such agreements did exist. and all parties involved agreed that the companies should pay out $324.5 million to affected employees.